More from Down Under

Ray and I had a chance to chat with Ron Klinger before he started to play yesterday at the Sydney Spring Nationals.  His team is leading after the second day of play in the qualifying rounds (a Swiss).

Ron Klinger

Ron is blogging from the Spring Nationals and you can read his blog at

http://ronklingerbridge.com/blog/1701/spring-national-open-teams-2008-entry-1

Ron let us know his blog was all business.  Bridge and bridge and none of the personal stuff (like mine).  I didn’t find the hand in the today’s blog difficult but I do enjoy reading his blog generally.

After our visit with Ron with took many components of the Sydney transportation system and arrived at The Bridge Shop.

http://www.bridgeshop.com.au

We had a very enjoyable afternoon with Nick Fahrer, the owner and a Master Point Press distributor.  It was fun to see a shop completely devoted to bridge.  Besides bridge books and software of all kinds there was everything from bridge supplies to bridge pillows.  There seemed to be lots of traffic at the store while were there a constant stream of customers showed up in person or on the phone.  I did notice that one of them bought one of our books.  Speaking of our books while I was at the tournament the young man I was watching asked me my name and when I told him, he asked if I was one of the editors of Northern Lights (which I confessed to be true) and he told me that he had really enjoyed reading it.  Nick also picked it out as one he really liked as well. 

I am looking forward to meeting Nick’s wife on Sunday and I plan to talk to her about women’s bridge.  She is a keen international player.

We want to go geocaching today as we visit some bridge clubs but Ray is quite worried about the insect life around the caches, after reading some of the warnings.  Still we want to get at least one Australian flag on our geocaching map.

We booked La Boheme at Sydney Opera House on Tuesday night which given my general dislike of opera shows great magnanimity on my part.  But I confess I do want to revisit that beautiful hall.

Ray and I have also been doing just a bit of system work.  Neither of us is clear about what we play and we also have to contend with CRO. This is a system which is generally illegal in most places (or brown sticker in WBF events).  This is an opening 2 bid which shows either 2 of the same colour (2H), 2 of the same rank (2S) and the remaining 2 suiters (2NT).  We did find some sort of defense where you bid 3C to show the 2 suits remaining which include clubs (for example if they have majors or minors, 3C would show overcaller had the minors and presumably opener had the majors) and 2NT if available to show the two suits that don’t involve clubs.  We don’t know how well this works but we hope it will get us by.  Hurry with a comment if you have any help here.